


loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves

by gabriel42069



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Cherubs - Freeform, F/F, Introspection, Love, Or the lack thereof, biological determinism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-20
Updated: 2018-01-20
Packaged: 2019-03-07 08:58:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13431348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gabriel42069/pseuds/gabriel42069
Summary: Cherubs are not capable of love. This is one of your simple, life-determining truths.





	loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves

Your existence is predicated on the continued truth of a few simple facts. If any of those facts stopped being true, the foundation of your existence would change radically, but they have not yet stopped being true, and with each passing unit you doubt more and more that it will ever happen.

The underlying truth about your life is that it is both boring and painful.

The days bleed into each other, and you try to stave off sleep for as long as possible to hold off the times when he wakes. You frequently find yourself rubbing at your bloodshot eyes and swallowing down yawns, suppressing them the way you suppress every weakness that you exhibit. Or at least try to. You will acknowledge that you are not very good at it: another weakness, paradoxically.

Cherub bodies do not need sleep. They have no need for rest. They are always being manipulated by one host or another. (You have felt like a parasite all your life, hosted within this foreign creature, except the relationship between your body and soul benefits neither and harms both.) 

It is your soul that needs to rest, and although your body can stay awake for weeks on end, your soul is not strong enough to claim it for that length of time. You steal days for yourself, take advantage of the moments when he is weakest to take control for a week. (It is hardly thievery when the time belongs to you, but you have always lived on borrowed time.)

There is not much to occupy you when your chain only extends several feet in any given direction.

You find things that seem sufficient to spend your time on.

You read the purple histories in your book, poring over every word and analyzing the scribbles on every page. By your eighth or ninth unit, you have it committed to memory, and by your tenth unit you start copying the drawings onto your walls. You like to think that in the unlikelihood that someone will stumble upon your cell-home after you die, they will think it is a part of history, rather than a sad jail for a sad girl.

You write about the adventures of Callie Ohpeee, who is the only person you have to bring you comfort. You know she is not real and you know you are not her, but you trace the curves of her horns in the drawings glued in your book and you believe that you could be her.

You learn magic, which you know is real (but even more importantly, you know it does not matter if it is real or not, because things can be important even when no one sees them; people can matter even if no one sees them, and no one ever will). You practice magic and you fire bullets into the wall when you are particularly bored.

Most importantly, you talk to the humans. 

The one shining star in your life is her.   
  
Her. The girl who only exists as pink text spilling across your screen. The girl who makes you want to cover yourself in pink, wrap it around you until all you can hear is her words echoing.   
  
Cherubs are not capable of love. This is one of your simple, life-determining truths. Your romance is caliginous and violent. It destroys galaxies and ends lives. It is always forced, and it is never loving. It is about taking, but human love is about giving. Giving your heart, and your soul, and every piece of yourself, and having them give it back, well-loved.   
  
You do not think you will ever experience romance. You do not want to chase anyone across the universe, your wings stretched so broad they sweep planets aside when they flap, and you do not want to be chased, running with all of your might and fear in your heart. You have never been predisposed to fighting; it is another one of your many weaknesses as a cherub. You are supposed to have the strength to claw your way towards life, to free yourself from childish half-life hell and to stake a fatal claim on your body. You are supposed to fight for the right to merge your body and soul.   
  
Every part of a cherub's life is about struggle. The struggle to be superior against your other half and the struggle to find and conquer your kismesis, to hunt him down across galaxies and to extract your pound of flesh for the tragic circumstances of your existence. (You are certainly embittered, but not against him; you do not want to punish him for the sin of being fated to be your mate.)   
  
This is how your future is laid out. You will fight, or you will lose. And if you lose, you will not have a life to lead any longer.   
  
No part of the plan involves love.   
  
In your research on trolls, you have learned a great deal about quadrants. While cherub romance is several degrees bloodier and crueler than troll spades, they are comparable (in the same way that you are comparable to her; your dying spark against her raging bonfire). Human romance, however, is analogous to matespritship, and that is what has always occupied your dreams.   
  
You were not made for love (and even if you were, you would not deserve it), but she makes your aching heart wish you were. When your soul sleeps, it dreams of her. She is there to hold you and she is not disgusted at your appearance. She kisses the cold chitin of your cheeks and the thin strips of your lips and when she looks into your eyes, there is no judgement there. Only hearts. She sings you to sleep and you wake up when you want to, in a body that belongs to you.   
  
In one dream, she hugged you.   
  
It was the kind of dream where your soul went roaming to meet hers, and she greeted you with open arms. It was the kind of dream that was a misnomer, because it was not a dream at all. It was real. Your dream self wore her troll disguise and she beamed at you with dull teeth and touched your hands with soft, warm skin.   
  
You told her the secret that you had never dared to confide to even her, the girl who made you wish you could love her: your name. It was a promise, you told her: a promise that you would make your way to her whenever she called.   


* * *

Your death is moderately inevitable and thoroughly expected.   
  
Under other circumstances, you could have resolved yourself into a hard, unyielding thing, someone who could rise up and take what was rightfully yours, and own the body that had owned you for so long. But she loved the soft parts of you, you know, and so you indulged them. You enjoyed acting like a troll (deluding yourself into thinking you could become one), and so the soft parts of you never hardened, and you yielded easily under his force. Day by day, his soul squashed you down, until you were so insignificant and small in your body that you just   
  
slipped   
  
away.   
  
It was a long time coming, as your naps stretched longer and your time awake dwindled. It was not a surprise.   
  
The afterlife, however, was one.   
  
Your soul fled to a cold, dark place, and when you regained consciousness, confusion struck you like a knife. You could not understand why the universe decided to torture you with a continued existence. A deathtime spent in the vast emptiness, alone.   
  
That is what you were, for the first time: alone. No matter where you looked inside yourself, you could not see a trace of him. In his predomination, he may have gotten the body, but you got your freedom. In the darkness, you wrapped your arms tight around your torso, closed your hollow eyes, and smiled.   
  
Time in the Furthest Ring seemed to go by   
  
ever   
  
so   
  
slowly,   
  
so you stood up and started to walk. The lightness of your right leg without the ankle cuff surprised you at first. You stood still and wiggled your feet delightedly. You skipped and twirled and danced around, giddy with an uninhibited range of motion. You had an infinite nothing and freedom, which was more than you had ever had before.   
  
Eventually, she appeared.   
  
Her! You could hardly believe it. Part of you had not expected to ever see her again. You had become accustomed to resigning yourself to unpleasant fates; it was your coping mechanism for the base circumstances of your life. But her face lit up when she saw you, her smile wider than the darkness stretching on the horizon, and she hurtled toward you, the tiny cape on her god tier ensemble flapping behind you as she enveloped you in a hug. Roxy pressed her face into your shoulder and you wrapped your arms around her and breathed in strawberries and sea salt.   
  
When she pulled back, she started babbling away, words spilling from her like a fountain, and you let them wash over you, enjoying more happiness in that moment than you had felt in sixteen Earth years prior.

You do not deserve love, but you think you have fallen into it nonetheless. 

* * *

Roxy’s face is bright and full of wonder, and she pulls you toward her. You feel sticky-sweet warmth on your cheek from the kiss she presses there, and the warmth on her hands seeps into your back through your suit.

“Callie,” she says, your name a song and a promise, her voice lilting and loving. She produces a bright bit of gold from her pocket and takes your hand in hers. “Callie, love!”

She slips the ring onto your finger and presses a kiss to your upper lip. You gasp as the cold metal touches your skin, and then the world changes.

You feel a body fill in around your soul, or maybe your soul takes form, grounds itself in the world with the magic of the ring and her love. You feel your empty eyes fill in, and you feel tears sting them, and she holds you tight in her arms, and whispers your name again and again, stretching a poem from the syllables. _Cal-lie, Call-ie, Ca-llie_. “I love you,” she says, and your heart opens wide.

Cherubs  _ can  _ feel love; or maybe they can’t; maybe you are the exception to the rule. Maybe something within you is broken. Some circuit has been shifted out of gear, some neuron in your brain has forgotten to fire at the right moment, or has perhaps fired too soon, and either way, you have ended up here. Your heart flutters when her skin touches yours, and it does not matter whether you were predisposed to have that reaction, because you are in love with Roxy Lalonde and she is in love with you in return, and that is the underlying truth of your continued existence.


End file.
